Wednesday, March 20, 2013

two amazing women

There are many
art glass centers across the nation, studios that bring in visiting
professional artists to teach, but until a few years ago there was no
such place in Houston. Now, thanks to Bob Paterson, we have Hot Glass Houston.

We've taught a
few classes there but better than that, he brings in some really
great talent, friends who I rarely see, just so I can visit with
them!

Not really.

He brings in
really great talent to teach and share amazing techniques. I'm lucky
enough to be able to barge drop in on their classes to see what they
are doing (and how they do what they do) and visit with my friends
who live out of state.

In the last
month he has brought in two amazing glass artists, Catharine Newell
and Linda Ethier.

Catharine paints
these wonderful dimensional portraits of people and birds and
landscapes by noodling colored glass powders around multiple layers
of glass and fuses them together. Her images are so evocative,
ethereal and filled with emotion. She just blows me away. And she
is so serene herself. I'm lucky enough to have two of her earlier
small 'notes'.

Linda is a
caster like me. When we first met and got to know each other she was
doing these wonderful thick castings with embedded figures and
flowers and things. Then she did a lot of commission work. And then
she didn't do anything at all for a while while she thought through and developed a completely new body of work that is so different from her
previous work you would not know it was the same artist. While I
really liked her work before, I adore her new direction. Maybe it's
because we use a lot of the same things in our work...bones, sticks,
leaves, egg shells, feathers.